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Fellows 2012-2013


The Italian Academy is pleased to announce the winners of the Fellowships for 2013-2014, selected through an open international competition. The jury is composed of dozens of senior scholars in many fields at Columbia and other leading universities.


Academic Year:
 |  2011-2012 |  2010-2011 |  2009-2010 |  2008-2009 |  2007-2008 | 
 |  2006-2007 |  2005-2006  |  2004-2005 |  2003-2004 |  2002-2003 | 
 |1993-2002 |


Paola Abenante
Università di Milano – Bicocca
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Culture and Religion
Pious bodies and Sensuous spirits: Sufi experiences and vocabularies in contemporary Egypt
(Fall 2012 and Spring 2013)

Paola Abenante graduated from La Sapienza University in Rome and did her master's degree in Anthropology and Ethnography at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris.
She received her Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2010 with a thesis on Sufism and religious subjectivity in contemporary Egypt.
Ethnographically her work describes the vocabulary and semantic scenes that inform Sufi praxis today and explores how individual Sufi disciples concretely mobilize beliefs and ritual practices to make sense of their everyday life. This combined analysis sheds light on the hermeneutic openings and inner tensions of the Islamic living religious tradition, thus questioning conventional understandings of Islam as a coherent set of doctrines and rituals that impose on human beings. On a theoretical level, the research specifically deals with the relation between phenomenological modes of analysis -- centering on notions of time, embodiment and the constitution of the religious self -- and the analysis of the discursive dynamics within the religious field in Egypt.
During her post-doc at the Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Bergen, her work centered on how people's religious commitment is constrained and reshaped by the urgency of social, economic and political conditions. In particular, since she started her collaboration as associate researcher at the IREMAM (Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman) in Aix en Provence in 2009, her work has dealt with the interplay between structural conditions of migration, religious networks and individual experience.

Fabio Barry
University of St. Andrews
Bernini, S. Andrea al Quirinale, and early modern architectural representation
(Fall 2012)

Fabio Barry studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, and briefly practiced the profession before receiving his Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. He was subsequently David E. Finley Fellow at CASVA before taking up a lectureship at the University of St. Andrews. Much of his published research has concentrated on artistic production in Rome, particularly Baroque architecture, and from liturgy to light metaphysics. His most recent work, published or in press, has been on medieval and antique art, particularly sculpture. An ongoing interest, the subject of his Ph.D., is the imagery of marble in the visual arts and literature from antiquity until the age of enlightenment, in which he attempts to identify the evocative qualities of materials (the "Material Imagination") before the era of mass production and standardization distanced materials from the realm of nature and myth.

Remo Bodei
Università di Pisa
Political traumas: how citizens reformulate their consciousness after the fall of a regime
(Fall 2012)

Born in Cagliari, Sardinia, Remo Bodei taught for many years at the Scuola Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa and, most recently, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studied and taught as visiting professor in various European and American universities (Ottawa University, Toronto University, NYU, Université Libre de Bruxelles, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, Universitat de Girona, Universidad Autónoma de México). His theoretical interests were initially focused on German classical philosophy, on Idealism, and on the culture, politics and aesthetics of the "Goethezeit" and the late nineteenth century. Later they shifted to twentieth-century utopian thought and to political philosophy; and, particularly in recent decades, to the aesthetics of the ugly and of the sublime, to the theory and the history of memory, oblivion, delusion, and individuality, and the nature of passions and desires.

Gianmario Borio
Università di Pavia
Compagnia di San Paolo / Italian Academy
Distinguished Visiting Professor

Avant-garde Music in Italy: 1950-2000
(Spring 2013)

Gianmario Borio graduated in Philosophy at the Università di Torino and gained his PhD in Musicology at the Technische Universität Berlin (under Carl Dahlhaus). He held research fellowships from the DAAD, the Paul Sacher Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 1993-1999 he was Associate Professor of Musicology at the Università di Pavia, since 2000 he has been a Full Professor at the same university. He has been a visiting professor at various institutions in Europe, Canada and the USA (he has taught or lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Tufts, Yale, UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Davis). In 1999 he was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association. In 2012 he was nominated Director of the Institute of Music of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice).
He has been a member of the editorial board of the journals "Il Saggiatore Musicale" (1994-2010) and "Acta Musicologica" (2000-2010); since 2005 he is a member of the editorial board of "Filigrane" and since 2008 of the "Swiss Yearbook for Musicology." He is a member of the advisory boards of "Journal of the Royal Musical Association," "Music Analysis," "Twentieth Century Music" and "Il Saggiatore Musicale." From 1994 to 2010 he was a member of the scientific board of Archivio Luigi Nono (Venice) and since 2010 of the Centro Studi Luciano Berio (Florence). Since 2006 he has been a member of the artistic committee of the Milano Musica festival, and since 2009 of the editorial board of Pavia University Press.
In 2002-2003 and 2005-2006 he was scientific director of a project on the History of Musical Concepts (supported by the Italian Foundation for Research and University). From 2006 to 2010 he directed, together with Hermann Danuser and John Rink, the European Network for Musicological Research. He is co-director of a research group on the interpretation of audiovisual works (www.worldsofaudiovision.org/).
His publications deal with several aspects of composition in the 20th Century, music theory and aesthetics. He is currently working on a book project on German theory of musical form in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Marta Cacho Casal
Villa I Tatti – Harvard University
Artists libraries and the migration of ideas in late Renaissance Italy and Spain
(Spring 2013)

Marta Cacho Casal received her doctorate from the Warburg Institute (University of London), where she also took an M.A. in Renaissance studies. Her book, Francisco Pacheco y su Libro de retratos (Madrid, 2011) earned her the first Alfonso Pérez Sánchez prize: Velázquez and his century from the Foundation Focus Abengoa, Spain.
Dr. Cacho Casal worked for several years at the Department of Prints and Drawings at The British Museum, London. Last year she was a fellow at the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence. Her publications have focused on Spanish and Italian art, prints and drawings and iconography. Most recently, she has been researching artists' libraries, the use and value artists ascribed to books, and the education of the artist during the end of the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Her aim is to write a general history of reading and 'book culture' among artists, particularly painters, in the late Renaissance period, taking as a comparative study the cases of Italy and Spain. From September 2012 she will be Senior Fellow at the Drawings Institute of The Morgan Library and Museum, New York.

Philippe Canguilhem
Université de Toulouse II – Le Mirail
In the shade of the laurel: music and culture in Florence, 1530-1570
(Spring 2013)

Philippe Canguilhem is Professor of Musicology at the University of Toulouse (France). His work focuses on Italian music in the 16th century, with special emphasis on Florentine musical life. He is also interested in improvised counterpoint in the Renaissance, and is about to publish an edition and translation of Vicente Lusitano's counterpoint treatises. He has been a fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2005-6).
Along with articles in international journals, he has published books on Vincenzo Galilei (2001) and Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli (2003). He is currently working on a monograph about music and culture in Florence during the principate of Cosimo I.

Elena Casetta
Università di Torino
Biodiversity: the methodological challenges
(Fall 2012)

A graduate of the University of Turin, Elena Casetta received her PhD in Philosophy from the Italian Institute of Human Sciences in Naples. She has been a Visiting Post-doctoral Fellow at IHPST (Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques), CNRS/Paris, and she is a currently a member of the Laboratory for Ontology at the University of Turin, where she is also serving as an associate editor of the Rivista di Estetica.
Her areas of specialization are the philosophy of biology, analytic ontology, and metaphysics, and her areas of competence range from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of language. Her current research interests focus on the Species Problem and Biodiversity.
Among her recent and forthcoming publications: La sfida delle chimere. Realismo, pluralismo e convenzionalismo in filosofia della biologia [The Chimera Challenge. Realism, Pluralism, and Conventionalism in the Philosophy of Biology; Milan, Mimesis, 2009); Questioni di vita. Una introduzione alla filosofia della biologia [Life Matters. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology; with A. Borghini, Rome, Carocci, forthcoming); Making Sense of Gender, Sex, Race, and the Family (with V. Tripodi, eds.; HumanaMente, vol. 22, forthcoming).

Paroma Chatterjee
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Living icons: saints and representation in Byzantium and Italy in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries
(Fall 2012 and Spring 2013)

Paroma Chatterjee earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago (Dec. 2007). Her areas of research cover the visual arts of the medieval Mediterranean, particularly Byzantium and its connections with the Italian peninsula. The primary archive for her research is the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert, Egypt, which holds one of the most magnificent collections of Byzantine icons in the world. Paroma has published articles on subjects such as Byzantine image theory, St. Francis' stigmata, ekphrasis, and the Monastery of St. Catherine, among others. Her book project investigates the emergence of a novel iconic format -- the so-called "vita" icon, displaying the portrait of a saint flanked by scenes from his/her life -- in the eastern and the western Mediterranean in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Paroma's work has been supported by a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship, a Kress Travel Fellowship, and Mellon pre- and post-doctoral fellowships. After her year at the Italian Academy, she will take up a position at the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Luca Colnaghi
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry
Columbia University
The role of smoking in cocaine addiction
(Fall 2012 and Spring 2013)

After receiving his B.Sc. in Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics from the University of Milan, Luca Colnaghi moved to New York City in 2007, where in 2011 he received a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the NYU Langone Medical Center. He is now continuing his studies in the laboratory of Eric Kandel at Columbia University. He currently works on the molecular mechanisms of drug addiction and metaplasticity in the brain. Metaplasticity ascertains that past experiences may change synaptic architecture and neural circuitry, so that when another event comes along, it is experienced differently than if the past experience did not occur. He is studying how pre-exposure to nicotine and other drugs affect the systemic response to cocaine.

Anthony Cutler
The Pennsylvania State University
The Salerno ivories
(Spring 2013)

Dr. Cutler is the Evan Pugh Professor of Art History at Penn State University. The author of numerous books and articles, he has established himself as an international expert on ivory carving with such works as The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory, and Society in Byzantium (Princeton University Press). His most recent book is Byzantium, Italy and the North: Papers on Cultural Relations (Pindar Press). Dr. Cutler has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a resident in art history at the American Academy in Rome, and was awarded the Médaille François Ier of the Collège de France, Paris. He has held four fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University's Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, D.C., and has been the Paul Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He received the Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2001-2002 and was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago during spring 2001. Dr. Cutler was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for 2002-2003 and was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2005. In 2007, he was awarded the College of Arts and Architecture Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching. He is currently working on his book, The Empire of Things: Gifts and Gift Exchange between Byzantium, the Islamic World, and Beyond. In spring 2009 he was a senior research associate at the Khalili Centre at Oxford University, and in 2011-2012 he returned to Oxford as Slade Professor of Fine Art.

Ivano Dal Prete
University of Minnesota
Remapping natural history in early modern Italy: Antonio Vallisneri's scientific network
(Fall 2012 and Spring 2013)

Ivano Dal Prete obtained his Ph.D. in 2005 in the History of European Society (University of Verona). In 2005-2008 he was awarded research fellowships by the Institute for the History of Philosophical and Scientific Thinking (CNR-ISPF, Milan), by the University of Eastern Piedmont, and by the Edizione nazionale delle opere di Antonio Vallisneri (Milan). In 2008-2010 he lectured at Yale University in the History of Science and Medicine Program; in 2011-2012 he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis campus), where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses in the History of Science and Technology program.
Ivano Dal Prete was a visiting student at Northwestern University (2001), attended courses in the history and philosophy of science at the Centre Koyre, Paris (2001, with a scholarship from the University of Verona), and was a fellow of the Acadámie Française de Rome. In his research work, he has collaborated with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) "Shadyc," Marseille, with the University of Montpellier, with the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques (CHRST, Paris) and with Stanford University.
His research interests lie in the scientific culture of early modern Europe, with a focus on the Republic of Venice. He is particularly attracted by the interplay of science and art, religion and politics and by the exciting opportunities this field opens to interdisciplinary work. Rather than analyzing scientific controversies among leading intellectuals, he studies practitioners, amateurs, provincial academies and other "minor" actors that made up the social context of early modern science, and participated in its construction.
In 2008 he published the book Scienza e Societa' nel Settecento Veneto, a case study of the interrelations between science and society in the 18th-century Venetian provinces. In line with this approach, Ivano Dal Prete's book explores the physical and social spaces where debates on medicine, electricity, the human generation and the history of the Earth took place, and stresses the relevance of provincial and non-institutional contexts to a broader understanding of Enlightenment culture. More recently, he has studied the debate on the age and history of the Earth in Renaissance Venice, questioning the traditional assumption that the Biblical chronology was rarely challenged before the 18th century. At the Italian Academy, he will study the correspondence of Antonio Vallisneri (physician and naturalist, 1661-1730) to shed light on Italian local scientific networks and on their role in the shaping of early modern natural history.

Giacomo De Giorgi
Alexander Bodini Research Fellow in Global Development and Finance
Stanford University
Climate and the effects of the change in weather variability on consumption, savings and investment
(Spring 2013)

Giacomo De Giorgi graduated from the Universita' Luigi Bocconi in Milan.
His Ph.D., from the Department of Economics of the University College London, focused on development, labor economics, and applied microeconometrics.
In July 2006 he joined the Department of Economics at Stanford University. He is a member of BREAD, CEGA, CEPR, NBER and SCID/SIEPR.
He has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, the NY Fed, UAB-MOVE, and Bocconi. His work has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, the American Economic Journal, and the Journal of the European Economic Association.
He is currently working on: climate and development; business literacy and development; informality and productivity; risk sharing and consumption insurance; indirect effects of aid policies; demand estimation; social interactions; consumption inequality, migration; and evaluation of ALMPs.

Federico De Romanis
Università di Roma "Tor Vergata"
Comparative analysis of the Roman and Portuguese pepper trade
(Fall 2012 and Spring 2013)

Federico De Romanis graduated from the Università di Roma "La Sapienza." He was a fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples and received his doctorate in historical sciences from the Università della Repubblica di S. Marino in 1992. He has taught at the Università di Catania and at the Università della Tuscia, and is currently Associate Professor in Roman History at the Università di Roma "Tor Vergata." He is also a member of the Istituto Italiano per Africa e l'Oriente. Professor De Romanis's main fields of research are Indian Ocean trade in antiquity and the grain supply of ancient Rome. He is the author of Cassia, cinnamomo, ossidiana. Uomini e merci tra Oceano Indiano e Mediterraneo, L'Erma di Bretschneider, Roma 1996; the co-editor (with A. Tchernia) of Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India, Manohar, New Delhi 1997; and the co-editor (with S. Sorda) of Dal denarius al dinar: L'Oriente e la moneta romana, Istituto Italiano di Numismatica, Roma 2006.

Joerg Fingerhut
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Pictorial presence as a function of conflicting information-processing in two visual subsystems
(Spring 2013)


Corinna Gallori
Università di Milano
Preacher, healer, founder, and inquisitor: the image and cult of St. Peter Martyr
(Fall 2012)

Corinna T. Gallori graduated from the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy), and holds a PhD in Art History (2008) from the same university. Since 2009 she has been at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, firstly as a short-time post-doctorate fellow (Kurzzeitstipendiatin) of Prof. Alessandro Nova's directorate, and then as a researcher collaborating on the project "Imágenes en vuelo". Europa, Mexiko und die Globalisierung der Bilder in der Frühen Neuzeit (http://www.khi.fi.it/forschung/projekte/projekte/projekt10/index.html) of Prof. Dr. Gerhard Wolf's directorate.
Corinna's field of research focuses on Christian iconography and includes studies of the Mass of St. Gregory in Italy (15th to 16th century), and of the imaging of the Dominican saints Peter Martyr and Albert the Great in the 15th century. For the project "Imágenes en vuelo" she also researched the use of European prints as iconographic sources in Mexican featherwork, and the collecting of such feather mosaics in Italy.
Corinna is the author of several publications including, but not limited to, "Una mostra d'arte lignea e qualche novità sui rilievi Stroganoff," Rassegna di studi e di notizie, 31-34, 2007/08 (2008), pp. 121-52; 'Il trittico del Diözesanmuseum di Vienna,' Arte lombarda, 158-159, 2010, pp. 24-38; and the monograph Il monogramma dei Nomi di Gesù e Maria: storia di un'iconografia tra scrittura e immagine (Asola, 2012).

Guillermo Horga
Columbia University
Detecting auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia with multivariate pattern analysis of fMRI
(Fall 2012 and Spring 2013)

Guillermo Horga received his M.D. from the Miguel Hernandez University of Spain in 2004. He completed his clinical specialization in Psychiatry at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, Spain, where he started his studies on the brain mechanisms underlying schizophrenia. His dissertation work explores brain metabolism during the experience of auditory verbal hallucinations, the perception of voices in the absence of corresponding stimuli, in patients with acute psychotic symptoms.
After his residency, he came to Dr. Brad Peterson's brain imaging laboratory at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (Columbia University Medical Center) under the auspices of a fellowship from the Alicia Koplowitz Foundation, where he applied functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) to the study of the neural mechanisms of learning and cognition in health as well as their disruption in a number of mental disorders in youth and adulthood (including obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depression and schizophrenia).
His current work aims to combine fMRI techniques and computational modeling to better understand the mechanisms that generate psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia. This work promises to afford detailed insight into the mechanisms underlying psychosis with the ultimate goal of uncovering novel treatment targets for patients who do not benefit from standard treatments.

Lidia Santarelli
Brown University
Fellow Associate for the Academy project "Law and its Manifestations"
(Fall 2012)


Domenico Scarpa
Centro internazionale di studi Primo Levi, Torino
"Too many for one": Eugenio Montale's interlocutors, 1917-43
(Spring 2013)

Domenico Scarpa (B.A. in Political Science, Naples «L'Orientale», 1991; Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Universities of Trento and La Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III, 2004) is a literary consultant for the Turin-based Centro internazionale di studi Primo Levi, a regular contributor to the daily Il Sole - 24 Ore, and the editor of the third and last volume (Dal Romanticismo a oggi) of Einaudi's Atlante della letteratura italiana, directed by Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà.
For Italian publishing houses such as Einaudi, Mondadori, Feltrinelli, Adelphi, Sellerio, Utet, :duepunti, and Avagliano he has been the translator of Jonathan Coe, Philippe Forest, and Cathleen Schine as well as the editor of works by – among others – André Breton, Italo Calvino, Fruttero & Lucentini, Natalia Ginzburg, Mario Soldati, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
He has been a research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2007-2010) and has taught Italian Literature at the universities of Naples «L'Orientale» and Milano-Bicocca, and at Middlebury College (Vermont). He is the author of three monographic books: on Italo Calvino (1999), Natalia Ginzburg (2010), and Franco Lucentini (2011; winner of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize "Novecento in Saggio" for 2012); of the collection Storie avventurose di libri necessari (2010); and of Il segno del chimico. Dialogo con Primo Levi, printed by Einaudi and staged by Valter Malosti in Italy and by John Turturro in New York.